The latest addition to my website is Hakan Günday‘s Az (The Few). This is a very violent and grim book but also a very original one. It tells the story of two people called Derdâ, one male and one female. We start with the female one, who is married off to a violent man, when she is only aged eleven and immediately the couple go to London, where she is kept locked in a flat for five years. She escapes with the help of man who is into masochism – he loves being beaten by a woman in a chador – and gets involved in the drug trade (she becomes a heroin junkie) and porn films and ends up graduating from Edinburgh University. The male Derdâ loses his mother, aged eleven (his father is in prison) and struggles to survie, finally getting a job with a pirate publisher, where he learns to read but starts with Oğuz Atay‘s Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected), a very difficult post-modern novel. He becomes obsessed with Atay and violence breaks out in this part of the book as much as in the first part. Both parts do, finally, connect. It is grim, it is violent but it is original and very clever.